Tuesday, October 2, 2012

Why Wipe Wolves from Most of Wyoming?

Posted: 01 Oct 2012

It
never made much sense to me why Wyoming was so insistent on letting
people kill wolves at anytime, by any means, throughout most of the
state. Livestock losses to wolves are miniscule, elk are abundant, and
wolves will never likely reoccupy much of the state anyway – some of it
never was good wolf habitat, like the Red Desert, other areas are too
agricultural.

Yet the state’s plan to let people whoop up on wolves as much as they want in most of the
state has taken root, even though it goes against any notion of
responsible, science-based wildlife management. It has even won support
from folks who are supposed to be protective of not only our wildlife
itself, but also wildlife principles and policies: the Secretary of
Interior, U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, U.S. Forest Service, and some
hunting groups.

Was
I missing something? Is Wyoming that different from Montana and Idaho,
which manage wolves statewide without such reckless plans? I went down
to Wyoming to check it out.Prime Wolf Habitat in the Predator Zone
I focused on the southern Wyoming Range in western Wyoming, in the wolf
“predator zone” where wolves can be killed willy-nilly, even though most
of the land is in the Bridger Teton National Forest. I am no wolf
biologist, but the area sure looks like great wolf habitat, as confirmed
by the many wolf packs that have called it home over the years,
including today. There’s also the abundant prey — I saw two moose, in
addition to many elk and deer. Most of Wyoming’s wolf “predator zone” is
not as good wolf habitat as the Bridger-Teton National Forest, although
parts are. But that doesn’t mean the government should draw invisible
lines that wildlife can’t cross without fear of being killed.
So why is the Forest Service letting people come onto a national
forest to kill wolves without restrictions? Wildlife is one of the five
purposes of the national forests under the Multiple Use Sustained Yield Act, and the Forest Service is obligated to manage for healthy, viable populations of wildlife under the National Forest Management Act and the agency’s own regulations.

Yet in the southern Bridger-Teton – or southern Shoshone, or entire
Bighorn National Forest for that matter – you could locate a wolf pack
in mid-winter denning season (it’s not hard), bury the pups in their
den, and shoot the rest of the pack milling about nearby. This is not as
far-fetched as it sounds – people brag about doing similar things to
coyotes.

But why? The answers are predictable.

Elk

This is big-time elk country. So big, in fact, that the state feeds elk
throughout the region to make hunting them as easy as possible by
artificially cranking up their numbers. In fact, in 2011 Wyoming had
about 120,000 elk— more than all but three other states in the U.S.

Photo Credit: Jeff Gunn

On top of this government largesse, hunters in the area want the
government to keep wolves out so they don’t have any competition for
these elk.
Yet some of the hunting community’s fundamental principles are at
stake – that wildlife are a free-roaming, valuable public resource that
should only be killed for legitimate purposes. As apex predators, wolves
have an effect on nearly all species in an ecosystem. The hunting
community’s failure to stop what Wyoming is doing to wolves is likely to
come back to haunt them through wildlife they care more about.

Livestock

This is also big livestock country, particularly for sheep and cattle,
although I saw some horses running around loose too. The Bridger-Teton
touts its management of livestock, with even road signs claiming
“Livestock and wildlands now work in harmony to retain ecosystem
function.”

Yet one of the most important ecosystem drivers –wolves, a top
predator – are not welcome. A lot of people think wolves and livestock,
particularly sheep, can‘t coexist. Yet Defenders and our partners are
proving they can in projects across the region. I don’t think anyone’s
even tried it here. Instead, there is a pervasive belief that wolves are
a serious threat to livestock, even though in 2011 only 35 cattle and 30 sheep [PDF] were verified lost to wolves in Wyoming. There were surely some
losses that weren’t verified, but total losses are still well under
0.01% for both cattle and sheep across the state.

Now What?

Defenders and our colleagues are challenging the Fish and Wildlife Service’s rule removing wolves from the
Endangered Species Act in court. Yes, we know it will be controversial,
but the federal and state plans for wolves in Wyoming are just too bad.

The Fish and Wildlife Service is requiring a race-to-the-bottom
minimal population for wolves in the state – around 150. Wyoming is
abandoning its commitment to manage all wildlife in “public trust”, and
simply refusing to manage wolves in 85% of the state, setting a bad
precedent for all wildlife — one that some Montana legislators already
want to follow. The Forest Service and Bureau of Land Management are
refusing to follow their own obligations toward wildlife on public lands
and letting people do whatever they want to wolves.

While it looks like it could be a long time before we see wolves in
Wyoming managed like other large wildlife (the thousands of bears and
mountain lions in the state are not treated nearly this badly), the
state and the federal agencies could easily remedy some of the worst
abuses. Let’s hope the conservationist in all of them wakes up, and they
do.

The film offers an abbreviated history of the relationship between wolves and people—told from the wolf’s perspective—from a time when they coexisted to an era in which people began to fear and exterminate the wolves.

The return of wolves to the northern Rocky Mountains has been called one of America’s greatest conservation stories. But wolves are facing new attacks by members of Congress who are gunning to remove Endangered Species Act protections before the species has recovered.

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Inescapably, the realization was being borne in upon my preconditioned mind that the centuries-old and universally accepted human concept of wolf character was a palpable lie... From this hour onward, I would go open-minded into the lupine world and learn to see and know the wolves, not for what they were supposed to be, but for what they actually were.

-Farley Mowat, Never Cry Wolf

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“If you look into the eyes of a wild wolf, there is something there more powerful than many humans can accept.” – Suzanne Stone